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On Digestion - 5 Apr 2017

The past 6 months or so have been rough, from a dietary perspective, and a psychological one. I had to come to terms with the fact that my body's ideal diet at this time is something like paleo, and that my soul's ideal diet is a vegan one, and that it's hard for the two to meet.

I've eliminated numerous foods that are causing me digestive pain, which has helped, but I'm still finding myself in digestive hell anywhere from 1-14 days after kicking all animal products out of my diet. Despite this continuous self-experimentation, I still can't say definitively what the problem is.

On top of all of this, my weight has been creeping steadily back up. This Monday I hit 50 lbs (22 kg) over my ideal weight. Within hours of seeing that number, I had committed myself to a Whole30 (30 days of strict paleo, followed by a period of reintroduction), mostly to kick what I see as a tendency to binge on sweets. However, I quickly realized that the same problems that have plagued my past attempts at Whole30 would still occur here: I cannot eat meat 3x a day for 30 days, and it's easy for me to get overwhelmed with cleanup when I'm cooking breakfast and dinner each day, often just for me, and my spouse or I are also cooking meals for the her and the kids.

So, in light of all of this, here's what I'm proposing, in lieu of a Whole30 and a whole lot of heartache. My eating habits shall revolve around the following rules:

Avoid sweets, fried foods, and alcohol

Avoid foods that cause suffering, in me, or in another living being

Eat real food as often as possible

Simple. There are no hard, fast rules in there for me to rebel against, or fail against. I fully accept and acknowledge that I cannot eat sweets, fried foods and/or alcohol most days of the week and expect to lose any meaningful amount of weight without boosting my exercise levels way up. I also fully accept that occasional treats are OK, and will not derail me.

Just to be clear here, I do still consider myself to be an ethical vegan. I am not a dietary vegan at the moment, because as of recently, I haven't been able to do that and function. My goal with all of this is weight control, and setting myself up to succeed at figuring out what is going on with my body.